A Soldier Once

BY JOHN IRVING

Published: July 8, 2007

PEELING THE ONION

By Gunter Grass. Translated by

Michael Henry Heim. 425 pp. Harcourt. $26.

As a college student, I chose to take my junior year abroad in a German-speaking country -- because, in 1961 and '62, I read ''The Tin Drum'' twice. At the ages of 14 and 15, I had read ''Great Expectations'' twice -- Dickens made me want to be a writer -- but it was reading ''The Tin Drum'' at 19 and 20 that showed me how. It was Gunter Grass who demonstrated that it was possible to be a living writer who wrote with Dickens's full range of emotion and relentless outpouring of language. Grass wrote with fury, love, derision, slapstick, pathos -- all with an unforgiving conscience.

In the fall of 1963, I went to Vienna and became a student at the Institute of European Studies, learning German and reading German literature; I wanted to read ''Die Blechtrommel'' as Grass had written it, in German. I was 21. (I would never learn German well enough to read Grass -- even today, when he writes to me in German, I write him back in English -- but it was as a student in Vienna that I began to see myself as a writer of novels.) I had marked certain passages in ''Die Blechtrommel''; I'd memorized the English translations of these passages. It turned out to be a way to meet girls.

''Poland's lost, but not forever, all's lost, but not forever, Poland's not lost forever.''

The novel's hero, Oskar Matzerath, refuses to grow; because he remains childlike, small and seemingly innocent, he is spared the political events of the Nazi years while others die. As Bebra the dwarf warns Oskar, ''Always take care to be sitting on the rostrum and never to be standing out in front of it.''

Oskar may survive the war as a little person, but he doesn't evade the guilt. He drives his mother to her grave; he is responsible for the death of his uncle (Oskar's biological father), and he causes his presumed father to choke on his Nazi Party pin while the cuckold is machine-gunned to death by Russian soldiers. After the war, Oskar finally resumes growing -- in a freight car. A preternaturally talented drummer, he performs in a nightclub called the Onion Cellar, where the guests peel onions to make themselves cry. But Oskar Matzerath has no need of onions to help himself weep; he simply plays his drum and recalls the casualties he was witness to. ''Just a few very special measures were all it took to make Oskar melt into tears.''

''The Tin Drum'' was the most highly acclaimed novel of postwar Germany; Oskar Matzerath's refusal to grow was declared symbolic of the country's guilt. In the page-and-a-half-long penultimate paragraph of the novel, ''the onion juice that draws tears'' is mentioned in passing -- one image in a long list of more memorable images: ''the wall that had to be freshly whitewashed'' and ''the Poles in the exaltation of death'' were among the ones I loved best.

Grass himself, in this extraordinary first novel -- published in Germany in 1959 -- seemed to have much to atone for. The voice of ''The Tin Drum'' is all about atonement, as it shifts -- sometimes in the same sentence -- from a first-person narrator to a third-person narrative, again and again. But Grass was born in Danzig (now Gdansk) in 1927. He was 10 when he joined the Jungvolk, a feeder organization to the Hitler Youth; he was only a 17-year-old soldier in 1944, when he was captured by the Americans. (Even today, Gunter's noticeably American English is better than my German, and when we get together, we speak mostly in English -- with my occasional and excitable German thrown in.)

Grass was only a kid when Germany invaded Poland. What did he have to feel guilty for? I wondered. Was the burden of guilt in ''The Tin Drum'' the so-called collective German guilt? I was reading about this schuld in the newspapers when I was a student in Vienna. What I knew of what happened to the Poles -- Jan Bronski's death in the attack on the Polish Post Office -- I knew from ''The Tin Drum.'' Later, the people of Gdansk would make Grass an honorary citizen -- and why not? Oskar Matzerath's tale -- to me, even his refusal to grow -- was heroic.

And one cold winter day in Vienna, when no one entirely in possession of his faculties would have been inclined to undress, I took myself to an academy of the arts off the Ringstrasse and volunteered my services as a model for the life-drawing classes. ''I have experience, in America,'' I said, but I wanted to be a model because Oskar Matzerath is a model. It turned out to be another way to meet girls.

Sometime in that academic year, 1963-64, before I left Vienna, a friend from the United States sent me the English translation of Grass's second novel, ''Cat and Mouse.'' This time there was an unchanging first-person narrative, but the narrator remains anonymous for more than 100 pages; Mahlke, the main character, is identified in the first sentence, but he is referred to both in the third person and the second person throughout. The evasive narrator expresses his guilty feelings about what happens to Mahlke at the outset, when a cat is attracted to his Adam's apple (''the cat leaped at Mahlke's throat; or one of us caught the cat and held it up to Mahlke's neck; or I ... seized the cat and showed it Mahlke's mouse''). Later, when a schoolteacher is arrested (''probably for political reasons''), the still unnamed narrator writes: ''Some of the students were questioned. I hope I didn't testify against him.'' And there are more onions to go with the collective guilt: ''Perhaps if I rubbed my typewriter superficially with onion juice, it might communicate an intimation of the onion smell which in those years contaminated all Germany ... preventing the smell of corpses from taking over completely.''